Cultural Factors

Cultural factors exert broadest and the deepest influence on consumer behaviour. The marketer has to understand the role played by buyer's culture, subculture, and social class.

I.   Culture

Culture is most basic cause of a person's wants and behaviour. Human behaviour is mainly learned. Growing up in society, a child learns fundamental values, wants, perceptions and behaviours from the family and other significant institutions. A person normally learns or is showing to the following values: activity and involvement, success and achievement, progress, material comfort, efficiency and practicality, freedom, individualism, youthfulness humanitarianism, and fitness and health.

Every group or society has a culture, and cultural effect on buying behaviour can vary greatly from country to country. Failure to adjust to these differences may result in embarrassing mistakes or ineffective marketing.  For instance, business representatives of U.S.  Community attempting to market itself in Taiwan found this out the difficult way. By seeking more foreign trade, they arrived in the Taiwan bearing gifts of green baseball caps. It turned out that trip was scheduled a month before the Taiwan elections, and that green was the color of political opposition party. Worse still, the visitors learned after fact that according to Taiwan culture, a man wears green to indicate that his wife has been unfaithful. Head of the community delegation afterwards noted, "I don't know whatever happened to those green hats, but trip gave us an understanding of the tremendous differences in our cultures." International marketers have to understand culture in each international market and adapt their marketing strategies accordingly.

II.   Subculture

Each culture has groups of people or smaller subcultures with shared value systems based on general life experiences and situations. Subcultures include religions, nationalities, racial groups, and geographic regions. Various subcultures make up significant market segments, and marketers frequently design products and the marketing programs tailored to their requirements. Here are examples of four such significant subculture groups.

III.   Social Class

Approximately every society has some form of social class structure. The social Classes are society's relatively permanent and ordered divisions whose members share same values, behaviours and interests. Social class is not find out by a single factor, like as income, but is measured as a combination of occupation, income, education, wealth, and other variables. In some of social systems, members of different classes are reared for definite roles and can't change their social positions.  Marketers are interested in the social class because people within a given social class tend to exhibit same buying behaviour.

Social classes indicate distinct product and brand preferences in areas like as, home furnishings, clothing, leisure activity, and automobiles.